


The Tattoo

by soft_thrills



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s04e13 Never Again, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 13:52:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11738403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_thrills/pseuds/soft_thrills
Summary: Mulder and Scully finally discuss her tattoo and her trip to Philadelphia.





	The Tattoo

**Author's Note:**

> There is no such thing as too much post-Never Again smut. With apologies to anyone who has already seen it on Tumblr; I've decided to start a page over here too.

The mark on her back is years old when Mulder finally asks her to talk about it. “Tell me about the night you got your tattoo,” he says.

The question startles Scully out of the easy rhythm her mind and body had settled into. She might have chalked the request up to possessiveness, or even insecurity. But given that he asks it while he’s in the middle of fucking her, she doesn’t need to be a profiler to suspect it’s just the opposite. The threat presented by Ed Jerse, both as a sexual rival and her attempted murderer, have faded away with the years. What remains is a hot tattoo and a dirty story.

When you plan on fucking the same person and only that person forever (or until the alien invasion comes and you’re too busy for fucking, whichever comes first), you gotta keep things interesting. She saw Mulder’s penchant for dirty talk coming – it’s a prime component of pornography, after all – and her own fondness for it had been a happy surprise to Mulder. One of the best parts of their sexual relationship was that it had knocked her off the pedestal he’d put her on; she’d never much liked it up there.

“What do you want to know?” she asks sweetly.

He is on top of her, braced on hands that bracket her narrower shoulders, and he pumps into her with steady control, biding his time like a pilot flying a holding pattern.

“Everything,” he grins.

“Well, I never thought this would happen to me,” she parrots the old Penthouse line, “but…”

He huffs out a laugh. She wonders if he knows that she noticed when he let his subscription to Penthouse lapse a while back.

“I met him at the tattoo place,” she says, not particularly meaning to sound so low and breathy but not displeased about it. “He was handsome. When he asked me out, though, I lied – I said was leaving town. He gave me his card. I didn’t think I’d call, but I did hold onto it.”

“What made you call?” he asks.

“You. You called me about the case and you were such a jackass,” she says, with no real malice in it. “You wouldn’t stop bossing me around, even from hundreds of miles away.”

Seizing the theme, Mulder takes her wrists in his hands and holds them down near her ears. She rolls her eyes — making sure he sees her do it— even as she feels herself get wetter.

“I tried to hang up and you teased me. ‘What, do you have a date?’ Something like that. I wanted to call your bluff. Also, I was frustrated and feeling impulsive and I wanted to get laid. And although you were bossing me around and mocking me, you weren’t fucking me. So I figured somebody else might as well.”

He speeds up, giving it to her a little harder.

“I was an idiot,” he says.

She ignores him; there will be time for penance later. For now she’ll let him squirm.

“He wanted to take me out, somewhere nice. I didn’t want that. I asked him to take me to the dive where he got drunk before getting his tattoo.”

“Were you thinking about me?” he asks, his voice tinged with what seems to be genuine curiosity.

“Yes,” she says, wishing he’d let go of her wrists so she could touch herself. It’s her turn to squirm, and she does it enough that he gets the message – he puts both her wrists in one of his hands and moves the other to touch her. “We talked about you, actually, in a roundabout way. About my penchant for rebelling against authority figures.”

Even after baring her body and soul to him, it feels less cliche to say “authority” than “father” figures, even if the latter is a more accurate retelling. Bad enough she’s telling the tale of getting a tramp stamp, she need not make the daddy issues part of the storyline so obvious.

“You were angry. You wanted to show me I didn’t own you,” he says.

“I wanted to show myself. You weren’t ever supposed to know, after all. Sometimes you just get tired of being good, doing what’s expected. Even if it was about pushing back against you, I was doing it for myself. It was supposed to be my dirty little secret."

There’s something hot about him knowing it now, too. Other than the censored version she’d shared with a detective and then in a courtroom, she hasn’t really told anyone this story. In spite of the hint of shame she feels whenever she remembers it – or maybe because of it, but that level of psychoanalysis is her partner’s forte – sharing the story is making her hot. She knows Mulder can tell by the way he moves his thumb over her clit, just enough to drive her crazy, to string her along, but not quite hard or fast enough. He wants to draw it out, so she is languid and loose and tense and desperate all at once in the way only a long tease can make her feel.

“How’d you decide to get the tattoo?”

“I kept asking about his. He grabbed my arm as I went to look at it, hard, and asked why I didn’t get my own,” she says. “I called his bluff, too.”

“Did it hurt?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “Not too much. Like sunburn.”

“No, when he grabbed you,” he says. “Did it hurt?”

“In a not unpleasant way.”

Mulder’s hand tightens around her wrists and she can’t check her gasp. Back when they first started sleeping together, he’d figured that out about her almost as quickly as Jerse had.

"Tell me more about how it felt. The tattoo.”

“Illicit. My father would’ve killed me,” she laughs.

“I thought about you. How it would shock you. Because, technically, I was on duty, and because back then you thought I was some kind of saint. I couldn’t see the artist behind me, but Ed was hovering around in front of me, watching my face. It was the oddest sensation. It hurt, but it felt good.”

“It turned you on,” he says.

She hears the question but his hand around her wrist and his hand where they’re joined is making it hard for her to concentrate on anything other than her desire for him to move his fingers just a little faster. She feels her body coiling and he takes his hand away from her clit, making her moan in frustration and arch her pelvis up against his. He looks at her expectantly. She catches her breath and tries to remember what he’d said.

_It turned you on_ , not quite a question but a statement requiring a response nonetheless.

“More than I expected it to.”

“I want to look at it,” he says.

She’d been waiting for that, knowing he wasn’t going to bring her off like this, not yet, but knowing doesn’t make it any less frustrating when he pulls his cock out of her. Before she can move to turn over, his strong hands find her hips and roll her over. She stays flat on her stomach a moment, letting him get a good look at the subject of her story, the endless circle at the small of her back, the snake consuming its own tail.

It can be sad to be consumed by something, to consume something else whole, she thinks, but it can be satisfying too.

His finger traces the tattoo. “I didn’t think you were such a saint, you know,” he says, unconvincingly. “I had my suspicions.”

She smirks, though he can’t see it from his vantage point. He had his fantasies, maybe, of showing his prim-and-proper partner she wasn’t so prim and proper after all. But his shock after he’d actually found out left her doubtless he’d elevated her to some kind of untouchable status in his mind.

“You had no clue,” she says.

“What happened after?”

“We went back to his place. It was snowing, I was a little drunk, and I liked him. It didn’t take a lot of convincing from him for me to stay.”

Without warning he grabs her hips again and lifts them up, almost like he’s going to guide her into downward dog. But she gets the message and settles herself on her hands and knees. He’s fucked her like this dozens of times, but still she feels exposed, from the position and from the story. She feels his cock nudge against her, just a tease, just a reminder of what’s to come, of what she was telling him about. Anticipation thrums through her body as she waits for him to make his move. It is an odd mix of power and vulnerability – he is teasing her, making her squirm, making her share her dirty little secret, but at the same time it’s her story that sets the pace, that determines what move he will make next. It’s not a fantasy she’s spinning for him — it’s her story.

“What happened then?” he asks, voice lower, darker.

“He checked my tattoo. I wanted to look at his again. I went to touch it,” she omits the detail of the cigarette burn she found, which should have been a warning sign for her all those years ago. “He grabbed my arm, hard, so hard I gasped. And he kissed me.”

He slides inside of her. She doesn’t wait for him to ask for more.

“It had been a long time for me. We didn’t linger the way you do with someone you’re excited to get to know. I thought about you,” she admits. “I didn’t want to – I was so angry at you – but I couldn’t help it.”

“Jesus, Scully,” he hisses as he pumps into her harder.

She realizes they’ve never really talked about her fantasizing about him in the past. The night with Ed was long before she and Mulder finally started sleeping with each other, and now he knew she’d been imagining him years before – when she was just his partner, his loyal friend – while someone else fucked her.

“How?”

“From behind. It seemed fitting after the tattoo. A little rough.”

She remembers it herself. She was younger. There was no gunshot scar on her stomach. Her hair was different. She hadn’t found out about her cancer yet, but it was there inside her, a dark thing growing. Back then she was fixated on other dark things insider her, the things that made her go in those circles that had troubled her. She knew even then the only end of the circle was Mulder, to be consumed by him and their quest, and she hadn’t been ready to accept it, even as part of her wanted to.

"Did you come?”

“Yes,” she says simply.

She doesn’t have to add it wasn’t like it is with him. He knows that.

“I remember the day you came back to the office,” he says, and his fingers find her clit again. “I remember everything about how you looked. The suit you were wearing, the bruise on your face. I had read the file 20 times. There was a picture of the tattoo. I had stared at it.”

“I remember too. You were such an asshole to me,” she says.

She had hated him, just for an instant, when he had mocked her for appearing in their files again, when he made that crack about the Yankees tattoo. Then she had hated herself for still wanting him, for knowing she’d never really break the circle and that she didn’t really want to.

“I was angry and I wanted you so fucking bad,” he says, explaining but not apologizing. “It was either be a dick or throw you over my desk and find out about this Dana Scully I’d been missing out on, the one who got tattooed and fucked and didn’t apologize to me for it. I wanted to claim you, to punish you, maybe. Would you have liked that, Scully?”

He asks the question as if there’s only one answer, but hers probably isn’t what he expects.

“I probably would have clocked you, Mulder,” she turns over her shoulder and looks at him then.

She lets him stew just a second.

“But I did fantasize about it,” she says, looking in front of her again. “You cornering me. Daring me to pretend I didn’t want you to fuck me. Making me beg you to.”

The hand that isn’t on her clit wraps around the hair at the base of her neck. It’s true, she’d imagined it a million times, a million variations on the same fantasy: an argument, an angry Mulder fucking her into submission in the office, or occasionally somewhere else — her motel room from their first case after Jerse, her living room in the middle of the night, whatever. She might have killed him if he’d actually tried, but it was a fun fantasy.

"I would’ve taken you just like this, over the desk. I would’ve told you that you’d had your fun, but that you were mine now,” he says, speeding up his thrusts. It’s his turn to talk, to make her story his fantasy. She welcomes it because forming coherent sentences is getting a little harder as she feels a familiar tension build in her abdomen and her thighs as his fingers continue to work her clit, to tug at her hair. “You’re mine now, Scully.”

“Yes,” is all she can think to say. It’s startlingly similar to the fantasies that had run through her head. He’s always so good at this, figuring out just what to say so that it feels like he can look right through her and read every secret she ever tried to keep. The hazards and wonders of fucking a profiler.

She’s close, but he’s holding back on her still and she knows it. He’s the profiler but she knows Mulder’s sexual makeup and her own well enough to know what he’ll say next.

“And you’re right, I would’ve made you ask me for it.” He slows down until he practically stills inside her, and she shimmies in a vain effort to regain their pace. “You want me to fuck you harder, Scully?”

“Yes,” she gasps, “fuck me harder.”

“Do you want to come?”

Ah, the part where fantasy meets reality. Of course she wants to come, just like the younger version of herself they’re both picturing bent over that desk wants to come.

“Yes,” she hisses. “I want to come.”

He thrusts into her faster and she arches back to meet him. Even as she feels like there’s nothing left of her she hasn’t given him, he wants more.

“Hm?” he asks, as if he hadn’t quite heard her declaration.

Haven’t I been good, she considers mewling, or bad, whichever you prefer? But instead she is more direct, her tone and her words in an uncanny valley between a desperate plea and a non-negotiable order.

“I want you to make me come, and then I want you to fuck me until I can’t take it anymore.”

“God damnit, Scully,” he practically growls, and she shudders at his reaction.

He always knows what to say but she’s not so bad at it either. His fingers work her clit just right, and she concentrates on that and his other hand in her hair and the mental picture he’d painted of them, young and angry and desperate for each other in ways they couldn’t admit and she tumbles over the edge. He pulls at her hair to turn her head a bit so he can see her and as always she does what he wants, turning over her shoulder as she shudders, unable to glimpse the circle on her own back but able to catch his eye, just briefly out of the corner of hers. He gives her a naughty smile and she thinks she returns it, but she can’t be quite sure of anything as she loses the power to hold herself up on her elbows and sinks flat to the mattress.

She revels in afterglow, her body limp and relaxed in relief, the feeling of him following her down, sliding in and out of her, draping himself over her flat back and reaching up take her hand in his, a gesture somewhere between holding her hand and holding her down that somehow feels just right.

“This,” she murmurs, “this is what I wanted.”

It was true years ago and now still, she thinks. He grips her hand tighter in his and he comes, his head at the spot where shoulder meets neck, his ragged breaths and low moan that sounds like her name near her ear.

They lie still for a moment and just as the feeling of being content beneath him is about to give way to discomfort, he slides out of her and rolls onto his side, facing her. She is too tired to bother to move from her stomach, but she turns her head toward him, resting her chin on her hands. His hand goes to that spot on her lower back, the snake he’d touched over her clothes a million times before he’d touched it when the skin was bare.

“Well,” she says, after a pleasant silence. “That was more fun than unpacking it in a session with the Bureau psychologist.”

“Technically it was a session with *a* Bureau psychologist, Scully,” he grins.

“None of my previous sessions ended quite like that.”

“I’m sorry I was such a jerk about it all back then, Scully,” he says, gently tucking some of her hair behind her ear.

“Mm, you’re still a jerk sometimes, but I love you anyway,” she says.

“I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to thank you for that,” he says all too earnestly for her current mood.

“You know Mulder, there is something you could do for me,” she says very sweetly.

“Are you gonna call my bluff on that Yankees tattoo I threatened to get?”

“They did win the World Series. But no. I still don’t have a desk.”

"I thought it wasn’t about the desk, Scully.”

“It wasn’t. But I still want one.”

“Can we have sex on it?”

At that, she rolls over and gets up, heading for the bathroom. As she crosses the room, she looks back at him and smiles.

“No,” she tosses over her shoulder, “but I’ll let you sink my Battleship.”


End file.
